Business strategies often require planning well in advance of implementation. Many companies use service providers to provide skilled personnel for use in implementing those companies' respective business plans, because many service providers have a vast array of technically trained personnel from which to staff business strategies. One key to successful implementation of a business plan involves successfully predicting the resources, such as appropriately trained personnel, needed to carry out the business plan and implementing a strategy to ensure those resources will be in place when needed.
It is important to accurately predict the technical resources needed to carry out a future business plan for either an internal or external customer. Typically, such resource planning involves analyzing the business needs of a customer, determining the skills required for the business plan of the customer, and training personnel, as necessary, in the skills needed to implement the business plan. However, conventional methods of resource planning have many limitations.
Conventional methods of resource planning typically require performing manual searches for skilled resources and analysis and can prove time consuming and costly. Conventional methods are especially problematic if the market analysis is extensive, the service provider has a vast number of candidates to search, or the customer needs highly specialized or large numbers of skilled personnel. A service provider having a large number of skilled candidates from which to fill a customer's needs can find conventional manual methods burdensome. This time consuming effort can result in a service provider not being able to provide the correct number of personnel, with the correct skill levels, within the time available for meeting the customer's needs. In other words, due to process limitations, service providers often are unable to provide right people with the right skills at the right time.
Conventional methods of resource planning involve manually searching a personnel base to match appropriately qualified candidates to the technical resource requirements of the customer. Such technical resource requirements can include, for example, a pool of personnel that have the technical skills needed to service a customer's needs. After candidates are matched to the customer's needs, deficiencies in other skills may remain. Conventional methods for selecting candidates to meet a customer's technical resource requirements can not easily or efficiently identify these deficiencies. Because conventional methods for providing personnel to met customers' needs and accommodate future business plans do not effectively compare candidates' skill levels to the customer's needs, the service provider may have personnel assigned to a customer who are lacking essential skills to perform the service required by the customer. Conventional methods for resource planning are reactive and do not effectively provide training plans to enhance potential candidates' skills within the time available to meet the customer's technical resource requirements.